Hiya! I hope you're enjoying my story. Unfortunately, given the recent changes to the lore retconning the Institute of War, the summoners, and the entire League from existence in Runeterra, this story technically has no reason to exist. As you can imagine, that's put a real dampener on my urge to finish telling it. I'm going to put up the last two chapters I had already written (that would be Gnar and Vi's judgments) but I won't be writing any more after this. I have another cool story planned, but with work and school taking up a lot of my time I don't know when I'll be able to put it on paper. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of Vi Gabba! It's been a blast writing this, and I hope you feel the same way about reading it.

I recommend listening to "Baba Yetu" by Peter Hollins (a cover of the Civ 4 theme) and swapping to "El Dorado" by Two Steps From Hell when things get dicey. You'll know where.

Chapter 8

Caitlyn had mentioned her own Judgment once or twice, but had been skimpy on the details, possibly because she figured I'd never have one of my own, having been inducted by recommendation instead. I knew they'd take a look inside my mind, but beyond that tidbit of information I was in the dark before I even stepped through the door. Beyond the towering stone doors was an abyss, and it was with no small amount of hesitation that I began to walk forward into it, the sleeping yordle Gnar in my arms. I heard the door creak behind me as I stepped past, and when they slammed shut my eyes found nothing to adjust to in the absolute blackness. My ears picked up vague sounds that I assumed were my clothes rustling and my heart beating, but as I stood in the darkness those seemed to fade as well. The sensation of the fuzzy yordle in my arms dulled, and panic began to set in as I felt the rest of my body cease to exist… for a moment.

The stone floor became softer under my feet, which no longer felt as though they were wearing shoes. I looked down, but still saw nothing. My ears twitched, twisting on the top of my head, searching for ambient noises. Wait, the top of my head? I reached up, my arms feeling short and stubby, and caught the feeling of thin fuzz covering my face. Confusion made me explore more, and I quickly discovered that the fuzz covered my entire body. I spun, looking for a source of light- anything at all- and off in the distance, barely visible through the darkness, I saw the color green. Just a smudge in the nothing, but I anchored myself on it, stepping forward with legs that didn't feel as long as before, one foot after the other until the smudge was surrounded by pockets of light and color, hints of a something off in the distance that was infinitely more than the abyss.

My walk turned into a sprint, and I noticed the colors coalesce into shapes as they came closer to me. I heard distant birdcalls, and the scent of fresh air and pine trees wafted past my twitching, wet nose. I felt the darkness slip away behind me, a relic of a world I was leaving behind, and before I had realized it had left I was there, bounding across the soft grasses of a mountainside trail as trees raced past me, their trunks wider than I could possibly reach around, their branches reaching into the skies as if they were trying to grab the clouds themselves. I heard the sound of running water and moved towards it, getting down on all fours in a movement that felt perfectly natural to me, my black nails digging into the dirt and pushing me forward at frightening speed.

I arrived at a riverbed a few moments later, part of a small clearing in the woods that showcased lush greens and beautiful multicolored flowers mere inches from the gently-flowing waters of the shallow river. I slowed to a walk, returning to my back two feet as I let my tail drag across the ground softly, leaving a thin line in the dirt behind me as I came up to the edge of the riverbed. Across the river stood a large brown deer, its branch-like antlers indicating that the creature had lived a long life of growth. I felt strangely connected to it, not in a direct sense, but in a feeling like we shared the same energy, although it was a sensation too unfamiliar to really put my finger on. The deer watched me warily, then lowered its head and took a drink from the river. I reached over to do the same, and got a good look at myself in the process. My fur was soft and short, colored a deep pink with lighter pastel stripes of the same color on my forehead, arms and what appeared to be a bit of my back. A black blotch of fur sat below my left eye, and another on the left side of my neck. My eyes, huge and black, ran over my features, from pointed bat-like ears tipped with purple to short black claws in white-furred hands, until I heard a rustling sound in the distance and noticed the deer on the other side of the riverbed jump away into the bushes, gone before I'd realized he'd left.

Behind me the rustling got louder, and I felt the fur on the ridges of my spine stand on end in response to my growing anxiety. As it reached the river I tensed up, but even that didn't prepare me for the orange flash that shot past me and stumbled to a halt in the waters. Recognition struck me as Gnar turned around to face me, his blue-tipped ears twitching this way and that, and his tail wiggled excitedly. "Skoova!" he shouted with assertion in his voice, and while the words still sounded like incomprehensible gibberish to my human mind, I felt understanding set in, running on a deeper connection that felt unfamiliar to me. "Meechoo baba!" Come on, he was saying to me, it's coming.

Around that time I heard the thunderous crack of something big and heavy impacting with a tree trunk, and as I turned around to peer through the bushes Gnar had passed through I felt thudding steps shake the earth. Instinct took over and before I knew what I was doing I had begun to race through the water towards Gnar, only glancing over my shoulder when I heard the bushes snap apart behind me. A bear, larger than any I'd seen before, roared in anger as it charged past the riverbed, a pair of arm-thick antlers sprouting from either side of its head lowered like a battering ram towards us. The points of the antlers were blunted, but it still wasn't difficult to picture them slicked with my blood so I got down on all fours and ran, following the orange yordle in front of me as his blue-crested tail dipped and wove like fuzzy lightning around trees and bushes with expert speed.

I expected to grow tired quickly, but the surge of energy I felt seemed to stem from a well that had no bottom. We ran for quite some time, evading the angry beast as long as we could until eventually, with a defeated roar of anger, the bear ceased its chase and slowed to a halt. We continued to run until Gnar felt safe, and he stopped me on a branch of a tree near one of the cliff-sides of the mountain. I perched on the tree next to him, letting my purple-tufted tail hang down, and turned to face Gnar. He smiled a devious smile at me and took hold of a small roughly-sewn sack that had been tied to his waist, opening it to show me a feast of bright purple and blue berries of various shapes and sizes, some large enough to barely qualify as 'berries' in the first place. "Oochiga maka," he said hungrily. "Laga keebee hika!" Food not his. Now, we eat!

Gnar sat down on the tree branch and opened the bag wider, grabbing a large berry and scarfing it down happily before he noticed that I had not joined him. He pulled out another berry and offered it to me, and with a bit of hesitation I sat down next to him and bit into it. The outer skin of the berry was bitter, but not enough to ruin the decadent sweetness of the fruit inside. I finished it quickly, and noticed Gnar looking at me curiously. "Boochibee?" he asked innocently as he handed me another berry, "Gnar gabba." You are new? I'm Gnar.

I opened my mouth for a moment, then realized while I understood his speech on a base level, I didn't know what to say. The thoughts coalesced in my brain for a moment and I decided to speak to see what would happen. Something connected with something else a moment later, and while I wasn't directly responsible for the words I babbled, I knew the message was correct. "Vye gabba," I said nervously. "Lachoo higa tukee." I'm Vi. Not from here.

Gnar nodded, biting into a handful of smaller berries on a thin vine, and pointed out to the valley displayed below. "Deeba," he said with a wide smile, his mouth full of berries. There. I craned my neck to see around the branches out to the valley, and noticed a small group of brown dots, likely huts of some sort, nestled in the mouth of the valley, near a small canyon separating two of the snow-capped mountain ranges that made up the horizon. It had to be miles from here, but my eyes seemed stronger than I was used to, able to easily pick out the rough shape of the village despite the distance. He gave me another berry and then wrapped the bag up, tying it to his waist once again. "Keebee wop?" he asked. We go?

I thought about it for a moment, then nodded. I was beginning to understand why I had to find this place, why I had started in darkness. I was in Gnar's mind, his memories, his experiences. The world did not exist in this place if it did not exist around him. While odds were good that a pink yordle named Vi didn't exist in his past, it didn't mean I could stray too far from him, not here. I needed to stay close, to experience his memories, even if it wasn't through his eyes. Honestly I wasn't sure I would have wanted to get into Gnar's head- being a yordle version of myself was already weird enough.

Once he was satisfied with my answer he grinned his approval, and led me down from the tree into the underbrush of the mountainside. He led the way like he knew the place, and we talked on the way to his village. He was young, very young, but he'd grown up fast. Elders had gone missing in the ice up north, so the children like him were learning to hunt, to provide for the tribe. He had ran about this valley and the mountains surrounding it since he could walk, and he knew them well. I didn't expect this much from him- back in Piltover, he had behaved more like a vaguely-advanced puppy- but he certainly seemed more adept in this situation than I felt. I avoided telling him about the future while we traveled, worried that it would damage the memory and make it more difficult for him to remember it, and fortunately we made it to his village just after nightfall, before I'd had to make things up about myself.

The village was a thriving ecosystem in and of itself. Yordles, simple and primitive like Gnar compared to those that ran the Academy in Piltover or took residence in Bandle City, appeared in all shapes, sizes and colors here. While the majority of the males tended to be brown, black or orange like Gnar, the females, while equally animalistic, often had purple or blue fur as short as mine, sometimes with white tufts on their heads, in between their large and pointed ears. I noticed that there weren't many older yordles, a sign that what he had said was true, and as we passed a few of the crude mud-brick huts the yordles had created, I tried to look inside to see if I could spot more of the yordles. Strangely enough, if Gnar had not looked inside the hut as he passed, I would only see darkness when I looked in, the blackened abyss of the chamber where his memories could not create a false reality.

I watched as we moved through the village, and saw many of the older yordles greet Gnar in their tongue as he passed by, friendly and jovial in meeting me as well. They were brothers, sisters, cousins and uncles, which gave me the impression that the yordles were more than a village, they were a family. The initial human thoughts that revelation brought on were ones of disgust, but when I sensed the warmth that these yordles held for each other, I couldn't help but embrace the sense of community I got from these creatures, these people like myself.

We reached a hut at the edge of the village and Gnar stopped, motioning for me to wait outside. I did so, noticing that what I could see of the horizon faded a bit as he went indoors, but when he returned it resumed its normal fidelity in the memory. Gnar had brought out a white skull, likely belonging to a large squirrel or some other such critter, and placed it on my head while I watched with confusion, nestling it between my two ears. It sat snugly and my eyes were drawn to the bird skull on top of his own head, and then to the skulls worn by the others in the tribe. It was a symbol of belonging, I realized. Gnar confirmed this with a warm smile that emphasized his teeth. "Boo takawaygo," he said warmly. You are home.

I grinned, feeling my feline teeth poke against my lips slightly, and opened my mouth to respond when I felt the temperature in the air plummet without warning, the words catching in my throat as if frozen solid. Fear, a deep and primal emotion that left no room for human reasoning, set in almost immediately, and I felt my fur stand on end as my eyes darted around searching for an origin of the danger. Gnar noticed it faster than I did and was already scaling the side of the hut, his eyes scanning the surroundings as he reached the roof of dried grasses and branches. My ears twitched this way and that, trying to locate the source of the cold, and they just managed to pick up the sound of undulating shrieks of yordle terror from the far end of the camp before the cries were suddenly cut short, removed from the air as if they had never existed.

Gnar shouted something in recognition of its origins and began bounding across the rooftops of the huts towards the other end of the village. I followed closely behind on the ground, carefully watching Gnar to make sure I didn't lose him, and we came to the other end were several of the huts had simply… stopped existing. The air blurred around grooves in the ground where huts had stood when we'd first come through this way, but when I tried to focus on them, to draw details into being, I found it impossible. This wasn't magic, not in the traditional sense, but rather an artifact of Gnar's memory, something he had chosen to forget, or that had been wiped away in the passage of time. It seemed strange, especially given how the world his memories had crafted had been so vivid until this moment, but I stopped wondering when I saw the creature causing the destruction float around one of the huts into view.

It defied description, partly because it resembled nothing I had seen before and partly because the blur of damaged memory obscured entire portions of its being, disassembling the visual clarity around it as if by an invisible fog. Tendrils of blue-colored cold slithered out from its center, their details blurred from memory but their shape and size indicating untold power. It hovered in the air, powered by what seemed to be raw magic, and pockets of light along its vague body seemed to emanate with a freezing presence that made my heart want to stop beating just from being nearby. The only thing that remained was the gigantic eye at its center, cold and blue and utterly alien in its origin. Recognition sparked dully in the back of my brain, reminding me of statues and carvings I'd seen along the frozen Freljord bridge of the Howling Abyss. It… My god, it was a Watcher.

My hands balled into fists, my teeth grinding as I summoned as much willpower as I could muster, but the feeling was off. I looked down at my furry paws, clenched into fists so small that the idea of them doing damage bordered on comedy. A sense of dread set in as I realized how weak I had become in this strange transformation, and it distracted me long enough to miss the Watcher preparing a strike.

The physical manifestation of cold hit me like a truck, waves of frozen power picking me up off my feet with actual physical force and throwing me like a ragdoll into the side of a hut. The sun-hardened mud bricks gave, but not enough to make it painless, and I squealed sharply as I felt thin and brittle bones break. My eyes shut from the pain, and when they opened I saw that I had gotten off better than the area around me. The spot of ground I had been standing at was frozen solid, cracks in the ground from instantly-frozen earth showing ice reaching into the depths of the dirt. The hut Gnar had been standing on had become another faded memory, another blur of nothingness, but I could feel the cold emanating from the blur and had a good idea what had happened to it and anyone unfortunate enough to be inside of it. For a moment I feared the worst, but then the air filled with the shrill war-cries of yordles.

Yordles, ten of them in total, sprung from the nearby huts armed with swords, spears, boomerangs and whatever sharp objects they could find, chittering angry cries as they gathered together near the edge of the icy ground. Gnar was among them, and I noticed that while he had gotten away, the tip of his tail was coated with a thin sheet of ice that told me it had been a close call. At once the yordles charged, throwing their spears and hucking their boomerangs with as much force as they could muster, their war cries drowning out the fear of the yordles that ran from the nearby huts away to whatever safety they could find.

It all amounted to nothing before the creature, which seemed entirely unaffected by the attacks. The pulsing blue lights along its tendrils thrummed with sickening power, and I could feel the air around me begin to crystallize. I looked away as it attacked, the blast of power creating a sickening sound made of yordle screams and frozen flesh splintering. I looked back to a blur, more artifacts of a past the yordle did not want to remember, but my other senses told me enough to understand the carnage. Of the ten yordles that fought, only Gnar remained, thrown by the force of the blast to the hut next to me, and apparently injured in a similar fashion. I saw blood dripping from a large cut across his arm and a missing chunk from his left ear, the cut frozen solid around once-warm flesh. In the wreckage I could almost smell the frostbite, the cool scent of preserved meat, and the tangible odor of fear. It sent a chill down my spine, brought on through emotion rather than temperature, and I pushed myself to my feet, but after a single step I felt a tearing agony in my leg and I toppled helplessly to the ground.

Nearby I saw Gnar stirring, already pushing himself to his feet. Defiance and anger fought for dominance of his expression, but when he saw me they both gave way to terror. He scampered over to me, ignorant of his injuries, and shook my shoulders until I whimpered weakly. "Gaboshee," I mumbled softly. I hurt. He tenderly touched my leg and it shot lances of cold pain through my body, eliciting another whine of agony. I looked into his eyes and saw the moment that fear and pain gave way to a boiling cauldron of anger, and in that moment I knew what was happening. And it scared me.

"Koono," he said slowly, his voice deepening as his fur darkened to a red the color of dried blood, "Koonoshee." No more hurt. He stepped away from me, his swelling arms dragging along the ground and his frame doubled in size in the span of a second. The Watcher, who had turned its attentions elsewhere, took notice of the growing Gnar, and I felt its cruel magic thick in the air as it prepared another blast. Gnar was halfway through his transformation, and in the cold I could see his hot breath escaping in massive puffs that rose a few feet in the air before vanishing into the cold night. He grunted as the pain of his injuries faded and he swelled even larger, but I knew with a sinking terror that he wouldn't make it in time. He towered over me, almost complete in his transformation when the Watcher attacked.

Gale winds of solidified cold struck the area like a tsunami, slamming into Gnar and rolling around him, just barely missing me by a hair's thickness. I felt the world around me freeze solid, the breath in my lungs threatening to solidify and strangle me to death. I wanted to move, to run away, but with Gnar's frozen body as my only shelter I tucked myself into as tight a ball as I could muster, trembling in the infinite cold, and I cried. Soon the onslaught of ice ended, and an unnerving calm fell over the area, as if it had suddenly become an undisturbed snowy morning. There were no more screams of terror, no more growls of anger, and the only cries of pain came weakly and quietly from my huddled body, hidden behind the ice statue that had once been my friend.

I shivered in the cold that seemed to encompass the entire world around me, my eyes clamped shut so tight that crystals of ice borne of my tears had begun to form to seal them. From very far away I heard shrill calls, the remaining yordles communicating to each other, and I felt the bone-chilling presence of the Watcher as it hovered by, the very air around it seeming to crystallize into snow. It felt as if my fur was going to freeze just by being nearby the creature, but my fear gave way to the slimmest of hopes when I heard the sound of ice cracking and fragmenting a few feet in front of me, right where Gnar had been frozen solid.

As the cracking grew louder I forced my eyes to open, breaking the small crystals that had formed around my eyelids so that I could gaze up at Gnar's frozen form. In the glow of the Watcher I could see spiderwebbing cracks forming in the frozen tomb, and underneath it Gnar's body began to shift and swell further, completing the transformation. A deep, rumbling tone began in his gut and doubled in force, then doubled again, resonating with the shattering until he flexed his massive muscles and broke free of his prison, roaring with a fury that provoked an ancient anger within me that I had to fight to control.

The Watcher's attention returned to Gnar as it was floating by, and it scrutinized him as if sizing up a piece of meat to be cut down, intelligent and utterly emotionless. I tried to cry out, to warn him of the Watcher's impending attack, but I could feel my body succumbing to the cold that cut right down to the very core of my being, and the words came out as a whisper, lost on the freezing winds. I felt my vision fading as the Watcher once again shook the very air with gathering power, and the temperature again did a nosedive. Gnar reached back, grabbing a destroyed chunk of a frozen mud hut, and threw it straight at the Watcher as it prepared to fire the shot. The dislodged rock collided with the Watcher and while it didn't do much, it made the creature sway, and its icy blast went wide of us, freezing an emptied hut into nothingness.

Gnar growled again, the sound making my bones shake, and I struggled fruitlessly to move, to get away from this clash of titans to a place where I could survive. I managed to push my shivering body to my feet, fear pumping me with enough adrenaline to ignore the pain in the exclusive name of survival, and I took a tentative step away from the two and towards the icy ground around me, the first step towards escape. With my back to the conflict I could still feel the air hum with growing power, another sign of the Watcher's unending attack, and heard the monstrous yordle howl in response. I felt the earth shake as Gnar ripped up the very ground itself, likely preparing another attack on the creature that I was convinced was a force of nature itself.

I made it as far as one of the few huts left intact when I heard the thud of impact and the terrible sound of the Watcher unleashing its power, and the two combined created a wave of sound that made my bones creak. I felt impacts all around me as fragments of ice and rock collided with the ground, but I was too weary to notice the dislodged chunk of frozen mud that fell from the hut and landed on my back.

Ice-cold pain ran laps along my body, and I squealed with equal parts surprise and agony and blood-chilling terror. I squirmed pathetically in an effort to escape, but something had broken in the impact, and I could feel warm blood pooling around the lower half of my body, which was slowly growing numb pinned underneath the slab of mudrock. I felt my vision fade in a haze of terrified pain as my hands scrabbled in futility at the ground, and was only dimly aware of the thuds of Gnar's titanic footsteps growing closer to me as I slipped from Gnar's memories back into the all-encompassing blackness of the judgment chamber.